My friends are in the paper!

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on November 8th, 2010 at 07:07 AM | | Tweet

The connection between social media and infringed privacy roil every once in a while around here—as they do in your home and office, I’m sure. I think that when I feel this most acutely is when I’m blindsided by an unexpected image on my computer screen.  Like, say, when I read the NYT headlines and suddenly see my Facebook friends’ status updates in the sidebar. I felt the same way recently, when on a trip to the East Coast, coming across a neighbor in a Cooperstown baseball tchotchke shop.  As though a ginormous chess player had just plucked me off of a square to set me down on another square, between a pawn and a knight from the Twilight Zone.

Upon seeing my Facebook friends all lined up before the cyber-fold, as it were, much head-scratching ensued. I don’t remember commanding this connection?  How does the NYT know who my Facebook friends are?  And then, I immediately stopped reading about Obama’s trip to India in order to sleuth this latest encroachment on my privacy.  And in my sleuthing I discovered that, turns out, I inadvertently hooked the two interfaces together during an iPhone frustration moment.  Somebody had posted a NYT article on my wall, and my finger accidentally touched the image, and, et voila, I was transferred to a sign-in page—which looked EXACTLY like the regular Facebook sign-in page.  Thinking I was just keying in my user/pw for Facebook itself (my iPhone interface periodically makes me re-sign in, particularly when a family member has logged me out to log into their Facebook account, so I didn’t think anything askance), I had now given permission to allow Facebook and the Times to share my bodily fluids.

Now, I can “undo, undo, undo” if I so choose, by simply engaging “disconnect”—and I think in this climate one is wise to be in as much control as possible of one’s Internet circumnavigation—-but the seemingly crafty way these two entities easily smerged my personal business brings me pause, and makes me ever the more cautious.